Anxious to avert dangers, as well as to relieve burdens, the great problem which British financiers have set themselves to solve, since the peace of 1815, has been to devise some means of paying off the public debt and reducing taxation. The boldest proposition to this end was brought forward by Mr. Ricardo, a gentleman of the liberal school of politics, an Edinburgh reviewer, celebrated for his controversy with Mr. Malthus, the writer on the laws of population and national wealth. For the ten years subsequent to the peace of 1815, the financial embarrassments of England more than once drove her to the borders of national bankruptcy. Mr. Ricardo, then being a member of the Commons, proposed, as the best mode of extricating the kingdom from those embarrassments, to tax its capital and property to the amount of, say £800,000,000, and pay the public debt off at once! He defended this scheme on the two-fold ground of justice and economy, contending that what a debtor owes ought always to be deducted from his property, and regarded as belonging to his creditors, and therefore should be given to them—that all estimates of the wealth of the debtor, till such deduction and payment are made, are false and delusive—that the then present generation had contracted nearly the whole of the debt, and therefore ought not to entail its payment upon posterity—and that, by immediately discharging the debt, the expense of managing it, and raising the revenue to pay the interest upon it, would be a large saving to the nation. These propositions he maintained with that vigor of reasoning, fullness of detail, and clearness of illustration, for which he was remarkable, and which won him a high place among the politico-economical philosophers of his time. But his scheme fell of its own weight, having few supporters except himself. It was in advance of an age which never thought of paying, but only of borrowing. Though its author did not convince the Commons of its practicability or expediency, he pretty thoroughly alarmed the capitalists and property-holders of the kingdom.
After many years of labor on the part of Mr. Vansittart, Mr. Robinson, Mr. Peel, Mr. Huskisson, and others, to cipher the public debt into non-existence, the hope of ever seeing it paid off seems to have given place to despair, to be followed by apathy. No sane Englishman now looks to see it discharged till huge monopolies which oppress the industry of the country are abolished, the system of Government entirely remodeled, and its expenses cut down to the lowest point of republican simplicity and economy. To talk of paying a debt of $4,000,000,000, whose annual interest is $150,000,000, whilst $117,000,000 is annually wasted on three blotches of the body politic, the Army, the Navy, and the Church, and 40,000 men own all the land of the kingdom, and every sixth man is a pauper or a beggar, is simply an absurdity.[15]
Taking this view of the subject, the radical reformers of England have struck at the root of the evil—a remodeling of the institutions of the State; and, in the departments of finance and taxation, have confined their efforts chiefly to the work of retrenching the Government expenditures. Foremost among these, and especially in the latter field, has stood the robust Joseph Hume. According to the forms of the British Constitution, the annual appropriations for the supply of the bottomless gulf of expenditure must take their rise in the House of Commons. And there, before they commence their line of march to that bourne whence no shilling returns, they have to encounter the severe scrutiny and determined opposition of clear-headed, honest-hearted, open-mouthed Joseph Hume. He contests all money-bills item by item, fastening upon them like a mastiff upon a gorged bullock.
I was listening, a few years ago, to a debate in the House of Commons on the civil list. Lord Stanley (then a member) had just closed an impetuous speech, when a broad-shouldered, rather rough-looking man, rose, and deliberately taking off his hat, which seemed to be filled with papers, commenced marshaling lazy sentences, under the command of bad rhetoric, to the music of a harsh voice. A pile of parliamentary documents lay on the seat by his side, and he held a bit of paper in his hand, covered with figures. My friend informed me it was Mr. Hume. He realized the portrait my mind's eye had drawn of the man who, by dint of tireless ciphering, had convinced the masses of England that they were the mere working animals of the privileged orders. His brief, plain speech was aimed at some measure supported by Stanley, by which the people were to be cheated out of a few thousand pounds, to pamper some titled feeder at the public crib. Stanley was racy and flowery. Hume's speech resembled his lordship's as little as Euclid's problems do Milton's Paradise Lost. He explained the figures on his paper, and drove the digits into Stanley by a few well-directed blows at "treasury leeches," and sat down. Mr. Hume is a walking bundle of political statistics. No other man will so patiently pursue a falsehood or a false estimate or account, through a wide waste of Parliamentary documents, till he drives it into the sunlight of open exposure, as he. But as to eloquence, he knows no more about it than a table of logarithms. He rarely makes a speech that does not contain a good deal of bad rhetoric, and an equal amount of arithmetical calculations. Entering Parliament thirty years ago, he immediately placed himself at the door of the national treasury, which he has ever since watched with the dogged vigilance of a Cerberus. He has been the evil genius of Chancellors of the Exchequer, worrying them more than the national debt or the public creditors; whilst sinecurists, pensioners, and fat bishops, have received an annual Parliamentary roasting at his hands. Delving among the corruptions of Church and State, he has laid bare the slimy creatures that fatten on the roots of those institutions, and suck out their healthful nourishment. Bringing every proposed expenditure of money to the test of utility and the multiplication table, he has opened his budget of statistics, night after night, and measured off columns of damning figures by the yard and the hour, contesting the sum totals and the details of the appropriation bills, backed sometimes by the whole force of the liberal party, often sustained by only a few radical followers, and not infrequently left wholly alone. Of course, he is occasionally felt to be a bore. But nothing deters him from pursuing the line he has marked out. Sarcasm is lost upon him. Wit he despises. Threats have no terrors for him. Abuse only rebounds in the face of his assailant. The House may try to scrape or cough him down—Lord John Russell's reproaches may salute his ears—Sibthorpe's clumsy abuse may fall on his head—Stanley's fiery shafts may quiver in his flesh—Peel may shower contempt upon him—but there stands clear-headed, honest-hearted, unawed Joseph Hume, entrenched behind a pile of Parliamentary papers, gathering up the fragments of his last night's speech, and displaying fresh columns of figures, for a renewed attack on some civil or ecclesiastical abuse, which has been hidden from everybody's sight but his, by the accumulated dust of a century. Under any other Government than one scandalously extravagant, and whose people are taxed to the last point of human endurance, such obstinacy as he has sometimes displayed, in obstructing the passage of financial measures, would be wholly inexcusable. But every expedient which the wit or pertinacity of man can devise, to defeat or diminish such plundering of the masses as he witnesses every session of Parliament, is not only tolerable, but a sacred duty. The objects of his guardian vigilance gratefully appreciate his services, knowing that no other man has done so much to expose monetary abuses, and pull gorged leeches from the national treasury, and turn them out to get their living from their native earth.
Let it not be supposed that Mr. Hume has devoted himself exclusively to exchequer budgets and appropriation bills. He has taken a leading share in all liberal measures, advocating Catholic emancipation, Parliamentary reform, West India abolition, and has long been an able champion of Free Trade. Nor do I mean it to be inferred from the "free and easy" style in which I have spoken of him, that he is not highly respectable, both as to talents and character. He is one of the best "working-members" of Parliament, and by constant practice and perseverance he has obtained a position amongst its able debaters. He was chosen Chairman of the Reform League, which was organized by Cobden and others, in the present House of Commons, to obtain equal representation and an enlarged suffrage, and he is the nominal if not the real leader of the present movement for Parliamentary reform.[16]
CHAPTER XXVII.
Defects of the Reform Bill—Origin of Chartism—The "People's Charter" Promulgated in 1838—The Riots of 1839 and 1842—The Vengeance of the Government falls on O'Connor, Lovett, Collins, Vincent, J. B. O'Brien, and Cooper—The Nonconformist Newspaper Established by Mr. Miall—Mr. Sturge—Organization of the Complete Suffrage Union—Character of the Chartists.
The old-fashioned Tories declare that the Reform Bill inscribed "Ichabod" on the British Constitution. Though it ushered in a better era, an experience of seventeen years has proved that power has not yet departed from the privileged few.